Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Logjam at the London Stock Exchange

Guerrilla Graduate Paul P., sent me this WSJ bit on the recent 7-hour outage at the LSE, with the remark: "This kind of outage is a big, big deal in my world." This is the second technical failure at the LSE in 2008. The article points at capacity problems:

"Traders experienced problems connecting to TradElect, a 15-month-old proprietary LSE platform developed with Microsoft Corp. technology that the LSE has touted as allowing it to expand and speed up its capacity for trades."

"By early afternoon, the LSE was informally telling customers that its system would be back online. That appears to have created a logjam as customers tried to reconnect at the same time."

This is almost a replica of a problem described by my colleague Steve Jenkin in our 2006 CMG-Australia paper:

"That load was completely disabled to improve system throughput for the most interesting capacity planning period on the busiest day. This scheduling was mandated by the Secure Hosting Facility after a software fault caused a flood of more than 6,000 emails to be issued after a multi-day stoppage. Such an email flood, containing several days of traffic in 10 minutes, brought the facility mail system to its knees ..."